Electricity is a necessity of modern life. It operates our factories, our buildings, our homes, and the appliances within them, and without it, human society would come to a halt. Although electricity is a vital form of energy, a large amount of it is wasted. Some is wasted actively, such as by lights left on after a person leaves the room or by an air conditioning system still operating while a person is away from home. Some is wasted passively by the failure to capture energy that is readily available for human conversion into power.
The sun radiates electromagnetic and thermal energy against the Earth continually, lighting and heating buildings, roads, sidewalks, pools, roofs, walls, and all manner of things in the world. These objects absorb thermal energy and later release it back into the environment. Heat that is not permanently absorbed, captured, or converted is lost. Efforts have been made to capture the thermal energy released by the sun, but the results have been less than satisfactory, either because of expense, maintenance, or inefficiency. Accordingly, there is a need for an improved system and method for capturing heat and converting it into energy.
One manner in which heat can be captured is through the conversion of a thermal energy gradient into electrical power. The thermoelectric effect is the transformation of a temperature or thermal energy difference into an electrical potential. This principle relies on the tendency of charged carriers to move from hot to cold. The Seebeck effect is the specific principle that a temperature difference will generate a voltage in a conductor.
Thermoelectric devices exploit the Seebeck effect. A thermoelectric device is typically a thin electrical assembly having a hot side, an opposed cold side, semiconducting materials spaced between the hot and cold sides, and leads extending from the device at which a voltage difference is established in response to the differences in temperature between the hot and cold sides. Thermoelectric devices are non mechanical, efficient, and reliable means of producing electricity from thermal energy, and there is a great need for power generated from renewable sources such as the heat radiated from the sun.